Abstract art does not just mean painting freely and wildly, putting it out there with abandon. If it did, any old doodle or curtain fabric would be abstract art. But modernist abstract painting in the 20th century found meaning in the colours, logic in the lines, discipline in freedom. The greatest abstract paintings convince you they are inevitable, because they have such inner coherence. The paragon of this art is Piet Mondrian. A model of his apartment in New York, where he spent the last few years of his life, in Tate Modern’s show is a glimpse into a world of intercrossed grids and pulses of colour, floating in space with musical harmony and tranquil conviction: a utopian vision just under the surface of every day life.
To reach this vision, Mondrian had to go through a series of inner and outer changes, stimulated by encounters with the revolutionary art movements of his time. Yet his closest allies, the De Stijl movement, who shared his love of primary colours and black lines, don’t get a look-in here. Instead, Mondrian’s art is hammered into his mystical religious interests, because this is all he shared with the Swedish medium and artist Hilma af Klint. She gets equal billing with Mondrian for her paintings that illustrate the ideas of the spiritualist movement and her own transcendental experiences. She would look better in another context – she has been rediscovered partly because she resembles 21st-century artists – but putting her next to one of the very greatest modernists does her no favours.
